


The Crying of People Everywhere

by alizarin_nyc



Category: Buffy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-28
Updated: 2006-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alizarin_nyc/pseuds/alizarin_nyc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xander visits the heart of darkness, or so he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Crying of People Everywhere

**Author's Note:**

> **Written for:** The [Scatterlings and Orphanages Africander ficathon](http://ludditerobot.livejournal.com/411561.html) hosted by [](http://ludditerobot.livejournal.com/profile)[**ludditerobot**](http://ludditerobot.livejournal.com/). My country was Sierra Leone.

_How can I face such slaughter and be cool?  
How can I turn from Africa and live?_  
-Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry From Africa

Xander woke from another sweat and terror-soaked nightmare.

This time, the Slayer was on fire; her mud and grass hut ablaze as she ran from it, fire streaming from her limbs up into the night sky.

He thought he could smell the scent of burning flesh seeping from his pores and tangling in the sheets. Running a hand through his hair, it came away damp. There was no hot shower, but he stumbled outside, kicking a chicken as he went, and dumped a bucket of cold water over his head.

“Mister Sander, you are up,” said Loko. His name wasn’t Loko, but that’s what Xander called him, since Xander couldn’t pronounce his real name. He’d said he was from Port Loko, just northeast of Freetown. Plus, he was more than a little nutty.

“You be wanting breakfast now?” Loko asked.

Xander had to laugh. Even in Freetown, they hadn’t stayed in what could be described as bed-and-breakfasts. A pallet with a blanket was one thing, a cold cup of near-solid coffee was something else.

“Sure, Loko,” Xander said. What the hell. The sun wasn’t up yet, but he wasn’t going anywhere near the sweaty, rancid mattress where he would only keep dreaming those dreams.

Usually, the Slayer was limbless. She came toward him, her eyes hollow shells filled with black, begging in an unknown tongue. When she raised her arms, Xander could see the scarred stumps where hands had been, and ugly man-made cuts all over where the blade had been too dull. He knew she’d been raped. He knew she was lucky to still have legs. Lucky to be alive, he supposes he’d say under other circumstances. But he could see that she isn’t.

She isn’t lucky to be alive, at all.

“Mister Sander, you look no better than the chickens today,” Loko said, breaking their enforced morning silence.

“How did you manage to do it, Loko,” Xander said, looking up over him after a particularly face-shifting grimace at the coffee. “I mean, how did you live, with all the killing going on?”

“How does one live with killing,” Loko repeated, looking carefully at Xander with his uneven eyes, the whites as white as the midday sky. He seemed to know that this was a question he could ask Xander as well.

“One just goes on living, what can be done?” Loko shifted on the bench, prodded the weak little fire with a stick. “The rebels would do what they would do, and people could not stop them. I am just lucky I lived my quiet life and nobody bothered me.”

“You didn’t care that all this was going on?” Xander thought about the people in Sunnydale, like his parents, people whose oblivion was considered a God-given right. And surely, people were the same everywhere.

“You wished me to run out and offer up my wife and children to the butchers?” Loko gave Xander a wry smile, an almost complicit grin. “You think it is my duty to poke my nose into the den of the lion and offer my tongue as a delicacy? Is this how the white Westerners behave when their countrymen are in trouble? I do not think so.” He shook his head sadly, as if Xander had asked him to hand over his last chicken and he was disappointed in such a selfish request.

“I don’t think so either,” Xander said. He looked quietly at Loko and wondered if he’d underestimated him. He’d been wildly garrulous ever since he met Xander at the Freetown airport, windmilling his arms and grabbing at every piece of luggage in Xander’s hands. He’d bowed and scraped obsequiously; offering to take care of Xander’s every need.

Xander had a “fixer” in every country, but Loko was unusual. The others had been quiet and serious, like an African version of Watchers. They’d given as many orders as they’d taken, and knew enough about Slayers already. Xander had been with a dark-eyed woman in Cairo, a thin suited older man in Addis Ababa, a round and jolly young man in Gambia.

Then he’d met Loko, who ran ahead of Xander at every step, singing, shouting, flinging his long fingers around in the air and rolling his eyes around in his head, his mouth wide and smiling. He didn’t ask questions, and didn’t seem to want to know anything about the Watcher’s Council that had hired him, or what they’d hired him for. Did he know, or not? Xander couldn’t tell.

They were up and walking before the sun got too hot. They rested in the shade at noon and waited, hoping for a bush taxi to pass by, or a truck, but there was only the empty road, and an occasional passenger car that would not stop. Reports of the Slayer placed her in a village well off the beaten path, and Loko told Xander that they could wait for the bus to the village -- which came once a week -- or they could hire a car. They hired a car, which broke down on the first day and the driver simply abandoned it and walked back to Freetown. Loko smiled broadly and assured Xander they could hitch a ride the rest of the way.

 _Right._

They’d been walking for the better part of two days now, with only the occasional temporary lift in the back of a truck.

Xander checked his map. The tiny village he was headed for was close to the Liberian border. Things were not as bad as they had been during the height of the civil war, but jesus, he wasn’t comfortable out here. There was a slim crazy man standing between him and certain death. He was used to a thin line, but it was – truthfully -- more comfortable with friends in Sunnydale.

Without Loko, he would be completely lost and at the mercy of strangers.

“Not to worry, Mister Sander,” Loko assured him as they settled in a couple of moth-eaten sleeping bags for the night. “You’re with me and everything is oh-kay.” His fingers formed a large “O” in a parody of the “OK” sign. Then he gave Xander two thumbs up and Xander rolled his eyes and turned away, facing the humid jungle instead.

That wasn’t any better because he imagined gleaming eyes staring back at him.

And then it rained.

Huddled with Loko in the jungle – yes, the very same jungle where he’d just seen ( _imagined_ ) ferocious eyes glowing – he cursed his stupid luck. _Sodding_ was the word. A word Spike would have used. His sodding luck, and also sodden to the bone. Everything he carried with him in a large pack was going to be soaked and dirty.

So why, oh why, was he fucking _here?_ What was this African adventure he thought he needed to experience because whatever he was, whatever he had been – a Scoobie – wasn’t good enough in the new world order?

He wanted to be angry at Willow, at Buffy, at Giles and Spike and Angel. All those folks that had the glamorous stuff going for them. Being the “heart” sucked. Africa was supposed to be Xander’s chance to carve a new niche for himself. A niche where it was pouring rain and people had their limbs chopped off in a civil war and the coffee was the consistency of blood and more bitter than dirt.

“Should stop any minute now!” Loko shouted at him over the downpour right into his ear. He seemed almost cheerful.

“In every life a little rain must fall,” Xander shouted back at him, thinking he’d appreciate the platitude. Loko looked at him like _he_ was the crazy one and gave him a weird smile, nodding only because that was what was required of him.

It was amazing how soon the dust came back right after a heavy rain. A thin layer of dust, with a deep crust of mud right beneath it, which sucked at Xander’s Nikes and created crater-sized footprints behind them. A whole day of suck-and-crater meant they were almost at their destination and by then, Xander almost could have cared less. No sleep meant no dreams, but it also meant he was fairly hallucinating by the time Loko said they were mere kilometers away.

Right when Xander thought he’d drop straight down in the dust and mud, a shout reached out to him and he saw, just as in his dreams, a young girl running along the path toward them. She had a long-limbed grace, and a concealed ferocity that said _Slayer!_

And maybe it was a dream, but she was whole and healthy, healthy and whole, and Xander breathed a giant sigh of relief. He’d be able to recruit her, take her to Cairo, introduce her to a waiting Watcher and conscript her to the army of Supermen.

It was all worth it.

Her name was Umu. She gave them some lunch and let them wash at the water pump. Then they took a “tour” of the village. Xander explained things to her bit by bit, slowly, as Giles had instructed him to. Asked her questions about the things she might have noticed that set her apart from other people.

“I am special, yes,” Umu told Xander in a heavily accented, deep voice. “When the killings began I was helping to farm my father’s land.”

Xander slowly put the pieces of fruit she had cut for them into his mouth as he listened to her. Juice dripped out of his mouth and down his chin and he scratched at it absentmindedly. He was taken with Umu. With her dark brown eyes, her masculine voice, her sure limbs and even the faint scars that swept across her skin like a herd of tiny white worms.

“You’ll come to England,” he finally announced. Loko, sitting next to him, shook his head eagerly.

“Yes, Miss, big chance for you. New life with these men. They take good care of you, like they take care of me,” Loko said.

“I’m sure you can understand Mr. Xander,” Umu replied. “I’m not going anywhere. My village needs me. Particularly, I would not put my fate in the hands of a group of men, as pleasant as you seem.”

“It sounds strange, I know,” Xander said, continuing to look eagerly into her eyes. “But you’re a Slayer. You’ll fight the good fight. We’ll train you to hone your skills, to improve your power, to kill demons.”

“The demons came to my village, Mr. Xander. They have already been here. If they come again, I am the only one who can protect my family and my village.”

Xander breathed in deep, counted to three and then continued his explanation. He invoked his very best Giles-voice. He told her the stories from Sunnydale and the Hellmouth.

Umu was unmoved. She explained to Xander that she had seen vampires. She had killed them. She had also seen rebels burning and looting for miles around. Her sister had been raped and then had both legs cut off. Umu broke her neck when her sister begged for mercy.

After lunch, Umu led Xander and Loko to a small hut where she introduced them to Mamusu, a woman with no right hand. She led them to the children’s garden, where scarred and skittish children played with dolls made of dried leaves.

“It is a country of men,” she said. “And the women, what do we do? Alone we make the toughest decisions everyday. The killers proclaimed it, ‘Operation No Living Thing.’ But we are alive. We are not refugees any longer. We live here and we are free.”

“But…” Xander began. How to explain the limitless void underneath their feet? How to explain the dangers from other dimensions, the need for an army of Slayers to sacrifice themselves and their futures for the rest of humanity?

“You cannot tell me there is a bigger war than what I have seen,” Umu said, as if she read his thoughts. “That there are cities more full of corpses than ours. You cannot tell me there are worse tortures for a woman or child. You cannot tell me I am more needed elsewhere.”

Xander couldn’t. And he didn’t. This wasn’t his argument to make. He would make the same argument to other girls, in other places that needed them, too. That was his role. And his Slayer was still out there.

It was time for him to leave this country and all its heartache behind.

And when he got back to civilization, he was going to recommend a pretty big raise for Loko.

*end*

The real life Umu’s poem about a woman refugee is [here](http://www.sierra-leone.org/poetry-umutejanjalloh.html). A few sentences are repeated in my fic.  
  
.  
.


End file.
